Library:Capital, vol. I/The process of accumulation of capital/The general law of capitalist accumulation

A growing demand for labour-power accompanies accumulation if the composition of capital remains the same

In this chapter we shall consider the influence of the growth of capital on the fate of the working class. The most important factor in this investigation is the composition of capital, and the changes it undergoes in the course of the process of accumulation.

The composition of capital is to be understood in a twofold sense. As value, it is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital, or the value of the means of production, and variable capital, or the value of labour-power, the sum total of wages. As material, as it functions in the process of production, all capital is divided into means of production and living labour-power. This latter composition is determined by the relation between the mass of the means of production employed on the one hand, and the mass of labour necessary for their employment on the other. I call the former the value-composition, the latter the technical composition of capital. There is a close correlation between the two. To express this, I call the value-composition of capital, in so far as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes in the latter, the organic composition of capital. Wherever I refer to the composition of capital, without further qualification, its organic composition is always understood.

The many individual capitals invested in a particular branch of production have compositions which differ from each other to a greater or lesser extent. The average of their individual compositions gives us the composition of the total capital in the branch of production under consideration. Finally, the average of all the average compositions in all branches of production gives us the composition of the total social capital of a country, and it is with this alone that we are concerned here in the final analysis.

Growth of capital implies growth of its variable constituent, in other words, the part invested in labour-power. A part of the surplus-value which has been transformed into additional capital must always be re-transformed into variable capital, or additional labour fund. If we assume that, while all other circumstances remain the same, the composition of capital also remains constant (i.e. a definite mass of the means of production continues to need the same mass of labour-power to set it in motion), then the demand for labour, and the fund for the subsistence of the workers, both clearly increase in the same proportion as the capital, and with the same rapidity. Since the capital produces a surplus-value every year, of which one part is added every year to the original capital; since this increment itself grows every year along with the augmentation of the capital already functioning; and since, lastly, under conditions especially liable to stimulate the drive for self-enrichment, such as the opening of new markets, or of new spheres for the outlay of capital resulting from newly developed social requirements, the scale of accumulation may suddenly be extended merely by a change in the proportion in which the surplus-value or the surplus product is divided into capital and revenue – for all these reasons the requirements of accumulating capital may exceed the growth in labour-power or in the number of workers; the demand for workers may outstrip the supply, and thus wages may rise. This must indeed ultimately be the case if the conditions assumed above continue to prevail. For since in each year more workers are employed than in the preceding year, sooner or later a point must be reached at which the requirements of accumulation begin to outgrow the customary supply of labour, and a rise of wages therefore takes place. Complaints were to be heard about this in England during the whole of the fifteenth century, and the first half of the eighteenth. The more or less favourable circumstances in which the wage-labourers support and multiply themselves in no way alter the fundamental character of capitalist production. As simple reproduction constantly reproduces the capital-relation itself, i.e. the presence of capitalists on the one side, and wage-labourers on the other side, so reproduction on an expanded scale, i.e. accumulation, reproduces the capital-relation on an expanded scale, with more capitalists, or bigger capitalists, at one pole, and more wage-labourers at the other pole. The reproduction of labour-power which must incessantly be re-incorporated into capital as its means of valorization, which cannot get free of capital, and whose enslavement to capital is only concealed by the variety of individual capitalists to whom it sells itself, forms, in fact, a factor in the reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the proletariat.¹

Classical political economy grasped this fact so thoroughly that Adam Smith, Ricardo, etc., as mentioned earlier, inaccurately identified accumulation with the consumption, by productive workers, of the whole of the capitalized part of the surplus product, or with the transformation of the surplus product into additional wage-labourers. John Béliers was already saying this in 1696: ‘For if one had a hundred thousand acres of land and as many pounds in money, and as many cattle, without a labourer, what would the rich man be, but a labourer? And as the labourers make men rich, so the more labourers there will be, the more rich men… the labour of the poor being the mines of the rich.’² So also Bernard de Mandeville at the beginning of the eighteenth century: ‘It would be easier, where property is well secured, to live without money than without poor; for who would do the work?… As they [the poor] ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving. If here and there one of the lowest class, by uncommon industry, and pinching his belly, lifts himself above the condition he was brought up in, nobody ought to hinder him; nay, it is undeniably the wisest course for every person in the society, and for every private family to be frugal; but it is the interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of the poor should almost never be idle, and yet continually spend what they get… Those that get their living by their daily labour… have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure. The only thing then that can render the labouring man industrious, is a moderate quantity of money, for as too little will, according as his temper is, either dispirit or make him desperate, so too much will make him insolent and lazy… From what has been said, it is manifest, that, in a free nation, where slaves are not allowed of, the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious poor; for besides that they are the never failing nursery of fleets and armies, without them there could be no enjoyment, and no product of any country could be valuable. To make the society’ (which of course consists of non-workers) ‘happy and people easier under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor; knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our desires, and the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily his necessities may be supplied.’³

What Mandeville, an honest man with a clear mind, had not yet grasped was the fact that the mechanism of the accumulation process itself not only increases the amount of capital but also the mass of the ‘labouring poor’, i.e. the wage-labourers, who turn their labour-power into a force for increasing the valorization of the growing capital, and who are thereby compelled to make their relation of dependence on their own product, as personified in the capitalist, into an eternal relation. In reference to this relation of dependence, Sir F. M. Eden remarks, in his The State of the Poor; or an History of the Labouring Classes in England,’ the natural produce of our soil is certainly not fully adequate to our subsistence; we can neither be clothed, lodged nor fed but in consequence of some previous labour. A portion at least of the society must be indefatigably employed… There are others who, though they “neither toil nor spin”, can yet command the produce of industry, but who owe their exemption from labour solely to civilization and order… They are peculiarly the creatures of civil institutions,⁴ which have recognized that individuals may acquire property by various other means besides the exertion of labour… Persons of independent fortune… owe their superior advantages by no means to any superior abilities of their own, but almost entirely… to the industry of others. It is not the possession of land, or of money, but the command of labour which distinguishes the opulent from the labouring part of the community… This [the scheme approved by Eden] would give the people of property sufficient influence and authority over those who… work for them; and it would place such labourers, not in an abject or servile condition, but in such a state of easy and liberal dependence as all who know human nature, and its history, will allow to be necessary for their own comfort.’⁵ Sir F. M. Eden, it may be remarked in passing, was the only disciple of Adam Smith to have achieved anything of importance during the eighteenth century.⁶

Under the conditions of accumulation we have assumed so far, conditions which are the most favourable to the workers, their relation of dependence on capital takes on forms which are endurable or, as Eden says, ‘easy and liberal’. Instead of becoming more intensive with the growth of capital, this relation of dependence only becomes more extensive, i.e. the sphere of capital’s exploitation and domination merely extends with its own dimensions and the number of people subjected to it. A larger part of the worker’s own surplus product, which is always increasing and is continually being transformed into additional capital, comes back to them in the shape of means of payment, so that they can extend the circle of their enjoyments, make additions to their consumption fund of clothes, furniture, etc., and lay by a small reserve fund of money. But these things no more abolish the exploitation of the wage-labourer, and his situation of dependence, than do better clothing, food and treatment, and a larger peculium, in the case of the slave. A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of the accumulation of capital, only means in fact that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-labourer has already forged for himself allow it to be loosened somewhat. In the controversies on this question, the essential fact has generally been overlooked, namely the differentia specifica of capitalist production. Labour-power is not purchased under this system for the purpose of satisfying the personal needs of the buyer, either by its service or through its product. The aim of the buyer is the valorization of his capital, the production of commodities which contain more labour than he paid for, and therefore contain a portion of value which costs him nothing and is nevertheless realized [realisiert] through the sale of those commodities. The production of surplus-value, or the making of profits, is the absolute law of this mode of production. Labour-power can be sold only to the extent that it preserves and maintains the means of production as capital, reproduces its own value as capital, and provides a source of additional capital in the shape of unpaid labour.⁷ The conditions of its sale, whether more or less favourable to the worker, include therefore the necessity of its constant re-sale, and the constantly extended reproduction of wealth as capital. Wages, as we have seen, imply by their very nature that the worker will always provide a certain quantity of unpaid labour. Even if we leave aside the case where a rise of wages is accompanied by a fall in the price of labour, it is clear that at the best of times an increase in wages means only a quantitative reduction in the amount of unpaid labour the worker has to supply. This reduction can never go so far as to threaten the system itself. Apart from violent conflicts over the rate of wages (and Adam Smith already showed that in such a conflict the master, by and large, remained the master) a rise in the price of labour resulting from accumulation of capital implies the following alternatives:

Either the price of labour keeps on rising, because its rise does not interfere with the progress of accumulation. There is nothing remarkable in this, for as Adam Smith says, ‘after these’ (profits) ‘are diminished, stock may not only continue to increase, but to increase much faster than before… A great stock, though with small profits, generally increases faster than a small stock with great profits’ (op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 189). In this case it is evident that a reduction in the amount of unpaid labour in no way interferes with the extension of the domain of capital. Or, the other alternative, accumulation slackens as a result of the rise in the price of labour, because the stimulus of gain is blunted. The rate of accumulation lessens; but this means that the primary cause of that lessening itself vanishes, i.e. the disproportion between capital and exploitable labour-power. The mechanism of the capitalist production process removes the very obstacles it temporarily creates. The price of labour falls again to a level corresponding with capital’s requirements for self-valorization, whether this level is below, the same as, or above that which was normal before the rise of wages took place. We see therefore that in the first case it was not the diminished rate, either of the absolute or of the proportional increase in labour-power, or the working population, which caused the excess quantity of capital, but rather the converse; the increase in capital made the exploitable labour-power insufficient. In the second case it was not the increased rate, either of the absolute or of the proportional increase in labour-power, or the working population, that made the capital insufficient, but rather the converse; the relative reduction in the amount of capital caused the exploitable labour-power, or rather its price, to be in excess. It is these absolute movements of the accumulation of capital which are reflected as relative movements of the mass of exploitable labour-power, and therefore seem produced by the latter’s own independent movement. To put it mathematically: the rate of accumulation is the independent, not the dependent variable; the rate of wages is the dependent, not the independent variable. Thus, when the industrial cycle is in its phase of crisis, a general fall in the price of commodities is expressed as a rise in the relative value of money, and, in the phase of prosperity, a general rise in the price of commodities is expressed as a fall in the relative value of money. The so-called Currency School* conclude from this that with high prices too much money is in circulation, with low prices too little. Their ignorance and complete misunderstanding of the facts⁸ are worthily paralleled by the economists, who interpret the above phenomena of accumulation by saying that in one case there are too few, and in the other, too many wage-labourers in existence.

The law of capitalist production which really lies at the basis of the supposed ‘natural law of population’ can be reduced simply to this: the relation between capital, accumulation and the rate of wages is nothing other than the relation between the unpaid labour which has been transformed into capital and the additional paid labour necessary to set in motion this additional capital. It is therefore in no way a relation between two magnitudes which are mutually independent, i.e. between the magnitude of the capital and the numbers of the working population; it is rather, at bottom, only the relation between the unpaid and the paid labour of the same working population. If the quantity of unpaid labour supplied by the working class and accumulated by the capitalist class increases so rapidly that its transformation into capital requires an extraordinary addition of paid labour, then wages rise and, all other circumstances remaining equal, the unpaid labour diminishes in proportion. But as soon as this diminution touches the point at which the surplus labour that nourishes capital is no longer supplied in normal quantity, a reaction sets in: a smaller part of revenue is capitalized, accumulation slows down, and the rising movement of wages comes up against an obstacle. The rise of wages is therefore confined within limits that not only leave intact the foundations of the capitalist system, but also secure its reproduction on an increasing scale. The law of capitalist accumulation, mystified by the economists into a supposed law of nature, in fact expresses the situation that the very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution in the degree of exploitation of labour, and every rise in the price of labour, which could seriously imperil the continual reproduction, on an ever larger scale, of the capital-relation. It cannot be otherwise in a mode of production in which the worker exists to satisfy the need of the existing values for valorization, as opposed to the inverse situation, in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development. Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.⁹

A relative diminution of the variable part of capital occurs in the course of the further progress of accumulation and of the concentration accompanying it

According to the economists themselves, it is neither the actual extent of social wealth nor the magnitude of the capital already acquired that leads to a rise of wages, but only the constant growth of accumulation and the degree of rapidity of that growth (Adam Smith, Book I, Chapter 8). So far, we have considered only one special phase of this process, that in which the increase of capital occurs while the technical composition of capital remains constant. But the process goes beyond this phase.

Given the general basis of the capitalist system, a point is reached in the course of accumulation at which the development of the productivity of social labour becomes the most powerful lever of accumulation. ‘The same cause,’ says Adam Smith, ‘which raises the wages of labour, the increase of stock, tends to increase its productive powers, and to make a smaller quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work.’*

Apart from natural conditions, such as the fertility of the soil, etc., and apart from the skill of independent and isolated producers (shown rather qualitatively in the high standard of their products than quantitatively in their mass), the level of the social productivity of labour is expressed in the relative extent of the means of production that one worker, during a given time, with the same degree of intensity of labour-power, turns into products. The mass of means of production with which he functions in this way increases with the productivity of his labour. But those means of production play a double role. The increase of some is a consequence, that of the others is a condition, of the increasing productivity of labour. For example, the consequence of the division of labour (under manufacture) and the application of machinery is that more raw material is worked up in the same time, and therefore a greater mass of raw material and auxiliary substances enters into the labour process. That is the consequence of the increasing productivity of labour. On the other hand, the mass of machinery, beasts of burden, mineral manures, drain-pipes, etc. is a condition of the increasing productivity of labour. This is also true of the means of production concentrated in buildings, furnaces, means of transport, etc. But whether condition or consequence, the growing extent of the means of production, as compared with the labour-power incorporated into them, is an expression of the growing productivity of labour. The increase of the latter appears, therefore, in the diminution of the mass of labour in proportion to the mass of means of production moved by it, or in the diminution of the subjective factor of the labour process as compared with the objective factor.

This change in the technical composition of capital, this growth in the mass of the means of production, as compared with the mass of the labour-power that vivifies them, is reflected in its value-composition by the increase of the constant constituent of capital at the expense of its variable constituent. There may be, for example, originally 50 per cent of a capital laid out in means of production, and 50 per cent in labour-power; later on, with the development of the productivity of labour, 80 per cent may be laid out in means of production, 20 per cent in labour-power and so on. This law of the progressive growth of the constant part of capital in comparison with the variable part is confirmed at every step (as already shown) by the comparative analysis of the prices of commodities, whether we compare different economic epochs or different nations in the same epoch. The relative magnitude of the part of the price which represents the value of the means of production, or the constant part of the capital, is in direct proportion to the progress of accumulation, whereas the relative magnitude of the other part of the price, which represents the variable part of the capital, or the payment made for labour, is in inverse proportion to the progress of accumulation.

However, this diminution in the variable part of capital as compared with the constant part, or, in other words, this change in the composition of the value of the capital, provides only an approximate indication of the change in the composition of its material constituents. The value of the capital employed today in spinning is 7/8 constant and 5/6 variable, while at the beginning of the eighteenth century it was 1/2 constant and 1/2 variable.* Yet, in contrast to this, the mass of raw material, instruments of labour, etc. that a certain quantity of spinning labour consumes productively today is many hundred times greater than at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The reason is simple: with the increasing productivity of labour, the mass of the means of production consumed by labour increases, but their value in comparison with their mass diminishes. Their value therefore rises absolutely, but not in proportion to the increase in their mass. The increase of the difference between constant and variable capital is therefore much less than that of the difference between the mass of the means of production into which the constant capital, and the mass of the labour-power into which the variable capital, is converted. The former difference increases with the latter, but in a smaller degree.

The progress of accumulation lessens the relative magnitude of the variable part of capital, therefore, but this by no means thereby excludes the possibility of a rise in its absolute magnitude. Suppose that a capital-value† is divided at first into 50 per cent constant and 50 per cent variable capital, and later into 80 per cent constant and 20 per cent variable capital. If, in the meantime, the original capital, say £6,000, has increased to £18,000, its variable constituent has also increased, in fact by 20 per cent. It was £3,000, it is now £3,600. But whereas formerly an increase of capital by 20 per cent would have sufficed to raise the demand for labour by 20 percent, now the original capital needs to be tripled to secure an increase of 20 per cent in the demand for labour.

We showed in Part IV how the development of the social productivity of labour presupposes co-operation on a large scale; how the division and combination of labour can only be organized on that basis, and the means of production economized by concentration on a vast scale; how instruments of labour which, by their very nature, can only be used in common, such as systems of machinery, can be called into existence; how gigantic natural forces can be pressed into the service of production; and how the production process can be transformed into a process of the technological application of scientific knowledge. When the prevailing system is the production of commodities, i.e. where the means of production are the property of private persons and the artisan therefore either produces commodities in isolation and independently of other people, or sells his labour-power as a commodity because he lacks the means to produce independently, the above-mentioned presupposition, namely co-operation on a large scale, can be realized only through the increase of individual capitals, only in proportion as the social means of production and subsistence are transformed into the private property of capitalists. Where the basis is the production of commodities, large-scale production can occur only in a capitalist form. A certain accumulation of capital in the hands of individual producers therefore forms the necessary pre-condition for a specifically capitalist mode of production. We had therefore to presuppose this when dealing with the transition from handicrafts to capitalist industry. It may be called primitive accumulation [ursprüngliche Akkumulation], because it is the historical basis, instead of the historical result, of specifically capitalist production. How it itself originates we need not investigate as yet. It is enough that it forms the starting-point. But all methods for raising the social productivity of labour that grow up on this basis are at the same time methods for the increased production of surplus-value or surplus product, which is in its turn the formative element of accumulation. They are, therefore, also methods for the production of capital by capital, or methods for its accelerated accumulation. The continual re-conversion of surplus-value into capital now appears in the shape of the increasing magnitude of the capital that enters into the production process. This is in turn the basis of an extended scale of production, of the methods for raising the productivity of labour that accompany it, and of an accelerated production of surplus-value. If, therefore, a certain degree of accumulation of capital appears as a pre-condition for the specifically capitalist mode of production, the latter reacts back to cause an accelerated accumulation of capital. With the accumulation of capital, therefore, the specifically capitalist mode of production develops, and, with the capitalist mode of production, the accumulation of capital. These two economic factors bring about, in the compound ratio of the impulses they give to each other, that change in the technical composition of capital by which the variable component becomes smaller and smaller as compared with the constant component.

Every individual capital is a larger or smaller concentration of means of production, with a corresponding command over a larger or smaller army of workers. Every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation. With the increasing mass of wealth which functions as capital, accumulation increases the concentration of that wealth in the hands of individual capitalists, and thereby widens the basis of production on a large scale and extends the specifically capitalist methods of production. The growth of the social capital is accomplished through the growth of many individual capitals. All other circumstances remaining the same, the individual capitals grow, and with their growth the concentration of the means of production increases, in the proportion in which they form aliquot parts of the total social capital. At the same time offshoots split off from the original capitals and start to function as new and independent capitals. Apart from other causes, the division of property within capitalist families plays a great part in this. With the accumulation of capital, therefore, the number of capitalists grows to a greater or lesser extent. Two features characterize this kind of concentration, which grows directly out of accumulation, or rather is identical with it. Firstly: the increasing concentration of the social means of production in the hands of individual capitalists is, other things remaining equal, limited by the degree of increase of social wealth. Secondly: the part of the social capital domiciled in each particular sphere of production is divided among many capitalists who confront each other as mutually independent and competitive commodity-producers. Therefore not only are accumulation and the concentration accompanying it scattered over many points, but the increase of each functioning capital is thwarted by the formation of new capitals and the subdivision of old. Accumulation, therefore, presents itself on the one hand as increasing concentration of the means of production, and of the command over labour; and on the other hand as repulsion of many individual capitals from one another.

This fragmentation of the total social capital into many individual capitals, or the repulsion of its fractions from each other, is counteracted by their attraction. The attraction of capitals no longer means the simple concentration of the means of production and the command over labour, which is identical with accumulation. It is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals. This process differs from the first one in this respect, that it only presupposes a change in the distribution of already available and already functioning capital. Its field of action is therefore not limited by the absolute growth of social wealth, or in other words by the absolute limits of accumulation. Capital grows to a huge mass in a single hand in one place, because it has been lost by many in another place. This is centralization proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration.

The laws of this centralization of capitals, or of the attraction of capital by capital, cannot be developed here. A few brief factual indications must suffice. The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends, all other circumstances remaining the same, on the productivity of labour, and this depends in turn on the scale of production. Therefore the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which large-scale industry has taken control of only sporadically or incompletely. Here competition rages in direct proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitude, of the rival capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, and partly vanish completely. Apart from this, an altogether new force comes into existence with the development of capitalist production: the credit system.* In its first stages, this system furtively creeps in as the humble assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individual or associated capitalists by invisible threads the money resources, which lie scattered in larger or smaller amounts over the surface of society; but it soon becomes a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralization of capitals.

Commensurately with the development of capitalist production and accumulation there also takes place a development of the two most powerful levers of centralization – competition and credit At the same time the progress of accumulation increases the material amenable to centralization, i.e. the individual capitals, while the expansion of capitalist production creates, on the one hand, the social need, and on the other hand, the technical means, for those immense industrial undertakings which require a previous centralization of capital for their accomplishment. Today, therefore, the force of attraction which draws together individual capitals, and the tendency to centralization, are both stronger than ever before. But if the relative extension and energy of the movement towards centralization is determined, to a certain degree, by the magnitude of capitalist wealth and the superiority of the economic mechanism already attained, the advance of centralization does not depend in any way on a positive growth in the magnitude of social capital. And this is what distinguishes centralization from concentration, the latter being only another name for reproduction on an extended scale. Centralization may result from a mere change in the distribution of already existing capitals, from a simple alteration in the quantitative grouping of the component parts of social capital. Capital can grow into powerful masses in a single hand in one place, because in other places it has been withdrawn from many individual hands. In any given branch of industry centralization would reach its extreme limit if all the individual capitals invested there were fused into a single capital.¹⁰ In a given society this limit would be reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company.

Centralization supplements the work of accumulation by enabling industrial capitalists to extend the scale of their operations. Whether this latter result is the consequence of accumulation or centralization, whether centralization is accomplished by the violent method of annexation – where certain capitals become such preponderant centres of attraction for others that they shatter the individual cohesion of the latter and then draw the separate fragments to themselves – or whether the fusion of a number of capitals already formed or in process of formation takes place by the smoother process of organizing joint-stock companies – the economic effect remains the same. Everywhere the increased scale of industrial establishments is the starting-point for a more comprehensive organization of the collective labour of many people, for a broader development of their material motive forces, i.e. for the progressive transformation of isolated processes of production, carried on by customary methods, into socially combined and scientifically arranged processes of production.

But accumulation, the gradual increase of capital by reproduction as it passes from the circular to the spiral form, is clearly a very slow procedure compared with centralization, which needs only to change the quantitative groupings of the constituent parts of social capital. The world would still be without railways if it had had to wait until accumulation had got a few individual capitals far enough to be adequate for the construction of a railway. Centralization, however, accomplished this in the twinkling of an eye, by means of joint-stock companies. And while in this way centralization intensifies and accelerates the effects of accumulation, it simultaneously extends and speeds up those revolutions in the technical composition of capital which raise its constant portion at the expense of its variable portion, thus diminishing the relative demand for labour.

The masses of capital welded together overnight by centralization reproduce and multiply as the others do, only more rapidly, and they thereby become new and powerful levers of social accumulation. Therefore, when we speak of the progress of social accumulation, we tacitly include – these days – the effects of centralization.

The additional capitals formed in the normal course of accumulation (see Chapter 24, Section 1) serve above all as vehicles for the exploitation of new inventions and discoveries, and industrial improvements in general. But in time the old capital itself reaches the point where it has to be renewed in all its aspects, a time when it sheds its skin and is reborn like the other capitals in a perfected technical shape, in which a smaller quantity of labour will suffice to set in motion a larger quantity of machinery and raw material. The absolute reduction in the demand for labour which necessarily follows from this is obviously so much the greater, the higher the degree to which the capitals undergoing this process of renewal are already massed together by virtue of the movement towards centralization.

On the one hand, therefore, the additional capital formed in the course of further accumulation attracts fewer and fewer workers in proportion to its magnitude. On the other hand, the old capital periodically reproduced with a new composition repels more and more of the workers formerly employed by it.

The progressive production of a relative surplus population or industrial reserve army

The accumulation of capital, which originally appeared only as its quantitative extension, comes to fruition, as we have seen, through a progressive qualitative change in its composition, i.e. through a continuing increase of its constant component at the expense of its variable component.¹¹

The specifically capitalist mode of production, the development of the productivity of labour which corresponds to it, and the change in the organic composition of capital which results from it, are things which do not merely keep pace with the progress of accumulation, or the growth of social wealth. They develop at a much quicker rate, because simple accumulation, or the absolute expansion of the total social capital, is accompanied by the centralization of its individual elements, and because the change in the technical composition of the additional capital goes hand in hand with a similar change in the technical composition of the original capital. With the progress of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital changes. If it was originally say 1:1, it now becomes successively 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 7:1, etc., so that as the capital grows, instead of 1/2 its total value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8, etc. is turned into labour-power, and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8, into means of production. Since the demand for labour is determined not by the extent of the total capital but by its variable constituent alone, that demand falls progressively with the growth of the total capital, instead of rising in proportion to it, as was previously assumed. It falls relatively to the magnitude of the total capital, and at an accelerated rate, as this magnitude increases. With the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent, the labour incorporated in it, does admittedly increase, but in a constantly diminishing proportion. The intermediate pauses in which accumulation works as simple extension of production on a given technical basis are shortened. It is not merely that an accelerated accumulation of the total capital, accelerated in a constantly growing progression, is needed to absorb an additional number of workers, or even, on account of the constant metamorphosis of old capital, to keep employed those already performing their functions. This increasing accumulation and centralization also becomes in its turn a source of new changes in the composition of capital, or in other words of an accelerated diminution of the capital’s variable component, as compared with its constant one. This accelerated relative diminution of the variable component, which accompanies the accelerated increase of the total capital and moves more rapidly than this increase, takes the inverse form, at the other pole, of an apparently absolute increase in the working population, an increase which always moves more rapidly than that of the variable capital or the means of employment. But in fact it is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population.

If we consider the total social capital, we can say that the movement of its accumulation sometimes causes periodic changes, and at other times distributes various phases simultaneously over the different spheres of production. In some spheres a change in the composition of capital occurs without any increase in its absolute magnitude, as a consequence of simple concentration*; in others the absolute growth of capital is connected with an absolute diminution in its variable component, or in other words, in the labour-power absorbed by it; in others again, capital continues to grow for a time on its existing technical basis, and attracts additional labour-power in proportion to its increase, while at other times it undergoes organic change and reduces its variable component; in all spheres, the increase of the variable part of the capital, and therefore of the number of workers employed by it, is always connected with violent fluctuations and the temporary production of a surplus population, whether this takes the more striking form of the extrusion of workers already employed, or the less evident, but not less real, form of a greater difficulty in absorbing the additional working population through its customary outlets.¹² Owing to the magnitude of the already functioning social capital, and the degree of its increase, owing to the extension of the scale of production, and the great mass of workers set in motion, owing to the development of the productivity of their labour, and the greater breadth and richness of the stream springing from all the sources of wealth, there is also an extension of the scale on which greater attraction of workers by capital is accompanied by their greater repulsion; an increase takes place in the rapidity of the change in the organic composition of capital and in its technical form, and an increasing number of spheres of production become involved in this change, sometimes simultaneously, and sometimes alternatively. The working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing.¹³ This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production; and in fact every particular historical mode of production has its own special laws of population, which are historically valid within that particular sphere. An abstract law of population exists only for plants and animals, and even then only in the absence of any historical intervention by man.

But if a surplus population of workers is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population also becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalist accumulation, indeed it becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates a mass of human material always ready for exploitation by capital in the interests of capital’s own changing valorization requirements. With accumulation, and the development of the productivity of labour that accompanies it, capital’s power of sudden expansion also grows; it grows, not merely because the elasticity of the capital already functioning increases, not merely because the absolute wealth of society expands (and capital only forms an elastic part of this), not merely because credit, under every special stimulus, at once places an unusual part of this wealth at the disposal of production in the form of additional capital; it grows also because the technical conditions of the production process – machinery, means of transport, etc. – themselves now make possible a very rapid transformation of masses of surplus product into additional means of production. The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of accumulation and capable of being transformed into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old branches of production, whose market suddenly expands, or into newly formed branches, such as railways, etc., which now become necessary as a result of the further development of the old branches. In all such cases, there must be the possibility of suddenly throwing great masses of men into the decisive areas without doing any damage to the scale of production in other spheres. The surplus population supplies these masses. The path characteristically described by modern industry, which takes the form of a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations) of periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis, and stagnation, depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population. In their turn, the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus population, and become one of the most energetic agencies for its reproduction.

This peculiar cyclical path of modern industry, which occurs in no earlier period of human history, was also impossible when capitalist production was in its infancy. The composition of capital at that time underwent only very gradual changes. By and large, therefore, the proportional growth in the demand for labour has corresponded to the accumulation of capital. Even though the advance of accumulation was slow in comparison with that of the modern epoch, it came up against a natural barrier in the shape of the exploitable working population; this barrier could only be swept away by the violent means we shall discuss later. The expansion by fits and starts of the scale of production is the precondition for its equally sudden contraction; the latter again evokes the former, but the former is impossible without disposable human material, without an increase in the number of workers, which must occur independently of the absolute growth of the population. This increase is effected by the simple process that constantly ‘sets free’ a part of the working class; by methods which lessen the number of workers employed in proportion to the increased production. Modern industry’s whole form of motion therefore depends on the constant transformation of a part of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed ‘hands’. The superficiality of political economy shows itself in the fact that it views the expansion and contraction of credit as the cause of the periodic alternations in the industrial cycle, whereas it is a mere symptom of them. Just as the heavenly bodies always repeat a certain movement, once they have been flung into it, so also does social production, once it has been flung into this movement of alternate expansion and contraction. Effects become causes in their turn, and the various vicissitudes of the whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the form of periodicity.* When this periodicity has once become consolidated, even political economy sees that the production of a relative surplus population – i.e. a population surplus in relation to capital’s average requirements for valorization – is a necessary condition for modern industry.

‘Suppose,’ says H. Merivale, formerly Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, and later on employed at the Colonial Office, ‘suppose that, on the occasion of some of these crises, the nation were to rouse itself to the effort of getting rid by emigration of some hundreds of thousands of superfluous arms, what would be the consequence? That, at the first returning demand for labour, there would be a deficiency. However rapid reproduction may be, it takes, at all events, the space of a generation to replace the loss of adult labour. Now, the profits of our manufacturers depend mainly on the power of making use of the prosperous moment when demand is brisk, and thus compensating themselves for the interval during which it is slack. This power is secured to them only by the command of machinery and of manual labour. They must have hands ready by them, they must be able to increase the activity of their operations when required, and to slacken it again, according to the state of the market, or they cannot possibly maintain that pre-eminence in the race of competition on which the wealth of the country is founded.’¹⁴ Even Malthus recognizes that a surplus population is a necessity of modern industry, although he explains this, in his narrow fashion, not by saying that part of the working population has been rendered relatively superfluous, but by referring to its excessive growth. He says: ‘Prudential habits with regard to marriage, carried to a considerable extent among the labouring class of a country mainly depending upon manufactures and commerce, might injure it… From the nature of a population, an increase of labourers cannot be brought into market in consequence of a particular demand till after the lapse of 16 or 18 years, and the conversion of revenue into capital, by saving, may take place much more rapidly; a country is always liable to an increase in the quantity of the funds for the maintenance of labour faster than the increase of population.’¹⁵ After political economy has thus declared that the constant production of a relative surplus population of workers is a necessity of capitalist accumulation, she very aptly adopts the shape of an old maid and puts into the mouth of her ideal capitalist the following words addressed to the ‘redundant’ workers who have been thrown onto the streets by their own creation of additional capital: ‘We manufacturers do what we can for you, whilst we are increasing that capital on which you must subsist, and you must do the rest by accommodating your numbers to the means of subsistence.’¹⁶

Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labour-power which the natural increase of population yields. It requires for its unrestricted activity an industrial reserve army which is independent of these natural limits.

We have so far assumed that the increase or diminution of the variable capital corresponds precisely with the increase or diminution of the number of workers employed.

But the number of workers under the command of capital may remain the same, or even fall, while the variable capital increases. This is the case if the individual worker provides more labour, and his wages thus increase, although the price of labour remains the same or even falls, only more slowly than the mass of labour rises. Increase of variable capital, in this case, becomes an index of more labour, but not of more workers employed. It is the absolute interest of every capitalist to extort a given quantity of labour out of a smaller rather than a greater number of workers, if the cost is about the same. In the latter case, the outlay of constant capital increases in proportion to the mass of labour set in motion; in the former that increase is much smaller. The more extended the scale of production, the more decisive is this motive. Its force increases with the accumulation of capital.

We have seen that the development of the capitalist mode of production, and of the productivity of labour – which is at once the cause and the effect of accumulation – enables the capitalist, with the same outlay of variable capital, to set in motion more labour by greater exploitation (extensive or intensive) of each individual labour-power. We have further seen that the capitalist buys with the same capital a greater mass of labour-power, as he progressively replaces skilled workers by less skilled, mature labour-power by immature, male by female, that of adults by that of young persons or children.

On the one hand, therefore, with the progress of accumulation a larger variable capital sets more labour in motion without enlisting more workers; on the other, a variable capital of the same magnitude sets in motion more labour with the same mass of labour-power; and, finally, a greater number of inferior labour-powers is set in motion by the displacement of more skilled labour-powers.

The production of a relative surplus population, or the setting free of workers, therefore proceeds still more rapidly than the technical transformation of the process of production that accompanies the advance of accumulation and is accelerated by it, and more rapidly than the corresponding diminution of the variable part of capital as compared with the constant. If the means of production, as they increase in extent and effective power, become to a lesser extent means for employing workers, this relation is itself in turn modified by the fact that in proportion as the productivity of labour increases, capital increases its supply of labour more quickly than its demand for workers. The over-work of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of its reserve, while, conversely, the greater pressure that the reserve by its competition exerts on the employed workers forces them to submit to over-work and subjects them to the dictates of capital. The condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the over-work of the other part, and vice versa, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists,¹⁷ and accelerates at the same time the production of the industrial reserve army on a scale corresponding with the progress of social accumulation. The importance of this element in the formation of the relative surplus population is shown by the example of England. Her technical means for the ‘saving’ of labour are colossal. Nevertheless, if tomorrow morning labour were universally to be reduced to a rational amount, and proportioned to the different sections of the working class according to age and sex, the available working population would be absolutely insufficient to carry on the nation’s production on its present scale. The great majority of the now ‘unproductive’ workers would have to be turned into ‘productive’ ones.

Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army, and this in turn corresponds to the periodic alternations of the industrial cycle. They are not therefore determined by the variations of the absolute numbers of the working population, but by the varying proportions in which the working class is divided into an active army and a reserve army, by the increase or diminution in the relative amount of the surplus population, by the extent to which it is alternately absorbed and set free. The appropriate law for modern industry, with its decennial cycles and periodic phases which, as accumulation advances, are complicated by irregular oscillations following each other more and more quickly, is the law of the regulation of the demand and supply of labour by the alternate expansion and contraction of capital, i.e. by the level of capital’s valorization requirements at the relevant moment, the labour-market sometimes appearing relatively under-supplied because capital is expanding, and sometimes relatively over-supplied because it is contracting. It would be utterly absurd, in place of this, to lay down a law according to which the movement of capital depended simply on the movement of the population. Yet this is the dogma of the economists. According to them, wages rise as a result of the accumulation of capital. Higher wages stimulate the working population to more rapid multiplication, and this goes on until the labour-market becomes over-supplied, and hence capital becomes insufficient in relation to the supply of labour. Wages fall, and now we have the obverse side of the medal. The working population is, little by little, decimated by the fall in wages, so that capital is again in excess in relation to the workers, or, as others explain it, the fall in wages and the corresponding increase in the exploitation of the workers again accelerates accumulation, while, at the same time, the lower wages hold the growth of the working class in check. Then the time comes round again when the supply of labour is less than the demand, wages rise, and so on. This would indeed be a beautiful form of motion for developed capitalist production! Before the rise in wages could produce any positive increase of the population really fit for work, the deadline would long since have passed within which the industrial campaign would have to have been carried through, and the battle fought to a conclusive finish.

Between 1849 and 1859 a rise of wages which was in practice merely nominal, although it was accompanied by a fall in the price of corn, took place in the English agricultural districts. In Wiltshire, for example, the weekly wage rose from 7s. to 8s.; in Dorsetshire it rose from 7s. or 8s. to 9s., and so on. This was the result of an unusual exodus of the agricultural surplus population caused by wartime demands,* and by the vast extension of railways, factories, mines etc. The lower the wage, the higher is the proportion in which even a very insignificant increase is expressed. If the weekly wage, for instance, is 20s. and it rises to 22s., that is a rise of 10 per cent; but if it is only 7s., and it rises to 9s., that is a rise of 28 4/7 per cent, which sounds very fine. Anyway, the farmers howled, and the London Economist, with reference to these starvation wages, prattled quite seriously of ‘a general and substantial advance’.¹⁸ What did the farmers do now? Did they wait until the agricultural labourers had so increased and multiplied as a result of this splendid remuneration that their wages had to fall again, which is the way things are supposed to happen according to the dogmatic economic brain? No, they introduced more machinery, and in a moment the labourers were ‘redundant’ again to a degree satisfactory even to the farmers. There was now ‘more capital’ laid out in agriculture than before, and in a more productive form. With this the demand for labour fell, not only relatively, but absolutely.

The economic fiction we have been dealing with confuses the laws that regulate the general movement of wages, or the ratio between the working class – i.e. the total sum of labour-power – and the total social capital, with the laws that distribute the working population over the different spheres of production. If, for example owing to a favourable conjuncture, accumulation in a particular sphere of production becomes especially active, and profits in it, being greater than the average profits, attract additional capital, then of course the demand for labour rises, and wages rise as well. The higher wages draw a larger part of the working population into the more favoured sphere until it is glutted with labour-power, and wages at length fall again to their average level or below it, if the pressure is too great. At that point the influx of workers into the branch of industry in question not only ceases, but gives place to an outflow of workers. Here the political economist thinks he can grasp the situation, he thinks he can see an absolute diminution of workers accompanying an increase of wages, and a diminution of wages accompanying an absolute increase of workers. But he really sees only the local oscillations of the labour-market in a particular sphere of production – he sees only the phenomena which accompany the distribution of the working population into the different spheres of outlay of capital, according to its varying needs.

The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active army of workers; during the periods of over-production and feverish activity, it puts a curb on their pretensions. The relative surplus population is therefore the background against which the law of the demand and supply of labour does its work. It confines the field of action of this law to the limits absolutely convenient to capital’s drive to exploit and dominate the workers.

This is the place to return to one of the great exploits of economic apologetics. It will be remembered that if through the introduction of new machinery, or the extension of old, a portion of variable capital is transformed into constant capital, the economic apologist interprets this operation, which ‘fixes’ capital and by that very act ‘sets free’ workers, in exactly the opposite way, pretending that capital is thereby set free for the workers. Only now can one evaluate the true extent of the effrontery of these apologists. Not only are the workers directly turned out by the machines set free, but so are their future replacements in the rising generation, as well as the additional contingent which, with the usual extension of business on its old basis, would regularly be absorbed. They are now all ‘set free’ and every new bit of capital looking round for a function can take advantage of them. Whether it attracts them or others, the effect on the general demand for labour will be nil, if this capital is just sufficient to take out of the market as many workers as the machines threw into it. If it employs a smaller number, the number of ‘redundant workers’ increases; if it employs a greater, the general demand for labour increases only to the extent of the excess of the employed over those ‘set free’. The impulse that additional capital seeking an outlet would otherwise have given to the general demand for labour is therefore in every case neutralized until the supply of workers thrown out of employment by the machine has been exhausted. That is to say, the mechanism of capitalist production takes care that the absolute increase of capital is not accompanied by a corresponding rise in the general demand for labour. And the apologist calls this a compensation for the misery, the sufferings, the possible death of the displaced workers during the transitional period when they are banished into the industrial reserve army! The demand for labour is not identical with increase of capital, nor is supply of labour identical with increase of the working class. It is not a case of two independent forces working on each other. Les dés sont pipés.* Capital acts on both sides at once. If its accumulation on the one hand increases the demand for labour, it increases on the other the supply of workers by ‘setting them free’, while at the same time the pressure of the unemployed compels those who are employed to furnish more labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour to a certain extent independent of the supply of workers. The movement of the law of supply and demand of labour on this basis completes the despotism of capital. Thus as soon as the workers learn the secret of why it happens that the more they work, the more alien wealth they produce, and that the more the productivity of their labour increases, the more does their very function as a means for the valorization of capital become precarious; as soon as they discover that the degree of intensity of the competition amongst themselves depends wholly on the pressure of the relative surplus population; as soon as, by setting up trade unions, etc., they try to organize planned co-operation between the employed and the unemployed in order to obviate or to weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalist production on their class, so soon does capital and its sycophant, political economy, cry out at the infringement of the ‘eternal’ and so to speak ‘sacred’ law of supply and demand. Every combination between employed and unemployed disturbs the ‘pure’ action of this law. But on the other hand, as soon as (in the colonies, for example) adverse circumstances prevent the creation of an industrial reserve army, and with it the absolute dependence of the working class upon the capitalist class, capital, along with its platitudinous Sancho Panza, rebels against the ‘sacred’ law of supply and demand, and tries to make up for its inadequacies by forcible means.

Different forms of existence of the relative surplus population. The general law of capitalist accumulation

The relative surplus population exists in all kinds of forms. Every worker belongs to it during the time when he is only partially employed or wholly unemployed. Leaving aside the large-scale and periodically recurring forms that the changing phases of the industrial cycle impress on it, so that it sometimes appears acute, in times of crisis, and sometimes chronic, in times when business is slack, we can identify three forms which it always possesses: the floating, the latent, and the stagnant.

In the centres of modern industry – factories, workshops, ironworks, mines, etc. – the workers are sometimes repelled, sometimes attracted again in greater masses, so that the number of those employed increases on the whole, although in a constantly decreasing proportion to the scale of production. Here the surplus population exists in the floating form.

Both in the factories proper, and in the large workshops, where machinery enters as one factor, or even where no more than a division of labour of a modern type has been put into operation, large numbers of male workers are employed up to the age of maturity, but not beyond. Once they reach maturity, only a very small number continue to find employment in the same branches of industry, while the majority are regularly dismissed. This majority forms an element of the floating surplus population, which grows with the extension of those branches of industry. Some of these workers emigrate; in fact they are merely following capital, which has itself emigrated. A further consequence is that the female population grows more rapidly than the male – witness England. That the natural increase of the number of workers does not satisfy the requirements of the accumulation of capital, and yet, at the same time, exceeds those requirements, is a contradiction inherent in capital’s very movement. Capital demands more youthful workers, fewer adults. This contradiction is no more glaring than the other contradiction, namely that a shortage of ‘hands’ is complained of, while, at the same time, many thousands are out of work, because the division of labour chains them to a particular branch of industry.¹⁹

Moreover, the consumption of labour-power by capital is so rapid that the worker has already more or less completely lived himself out when he is only half-way through his life. He falls into the ranks of the surplus population, or is thrust down from a higher to a lower step in the scale. It is precisely among the workers in large-scale industry that we meet with the shortest life-expectancy. ‘Dr Lee, Medical Officer of Health for Manchester, stated that the average age at death of the Manchester… upper middle class was 38 years, while the average age at death of the labouring class was 17; while at Liverpool those figures were represented as 35 against 15. It thus appeared that the well-to-do classes had a lease of life which was more than double the value of that which fell to the lot of the less favoured citizens.’²⁰ Under these circumstances, the absolute increase of this section of the proletariat must take a form which swells their numbers, despite the rapid wastage of their individual elements. Hence, rapid replacement of one generation of workers by another (this law does not hold for the other classes of the population). This social requirement is met by early marriages, which are a necessary consequence of the conditions in which workers in large-scale industry live, and by the premium that the exploitation of the workers’ children sets on their production.

As soon as capitalist production takes possession of agriculture, and in proportion to the extent to which it does so, the demand for a rural working population falls absolutely, while the accumulation of the capital employed in agriculture advances, without this repulsion being compensated for by a greater attraction of workers, as is the case in non-agricultural industries. Part of the agricultural population is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing proletariat, and on the lookout for opportunities to complete this transformation. (The term ‘manufacture’ is used here to cover all non-agricultural industries.)²¹ There is thus a constant flow from this source of the relative surplus population. But the constant movement towards the towns presupposes, in the countryside itself, a constant latent surplus population, the extent of which only becomes evident at those exceptional times when its distribution channels are wide open. The wages of the agricultural labourer are therefore reduced to a minimum, and he always stands with one foot already in the swamp of pauperism.

The third category of the relative surplus population is the stagnant population. This forms a part of the active labour army, but with extremely irregular employment. Hence it offers capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour-power. Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class, and it is precisely this which makes it a broad foundation for special branches of capitalist exploitation. It is characterized by a maximum of working time and a minimum of wages. We have already become familiar with its chief form under the rubric of’ domestic industry’. It is constantly recruited from workers in large-scale industry and agriculture who have become redundant, and especially from those decaying branches of industry where handicraft is giving way to manufacture, and manufacture to machinery. Its extent grows in proportion as, with the growth in the extent and energy of accumulation, the creation of a surplus population also advances. But it forms at the same time a self-reproducing and self-perpetuating element of the working class, taking a proportionally greater part in the general increase of that class than the other elements. In fact, not only the number of births and deaths, but the absolute size of families, stands in inverse proportion to the level of wages, and therefore to the amount of the means of subsistence at the disposal of different categories of worker. This law of capitalist society would sound absurd to savages, or even to civilized colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down.²²

Finally, the lowest sediment of the relative surplus population dwells in the sphere of pauperism. Apart from vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in short the actual lumpenproletariat, this social stratum consists of three categories. First, those able to work. One need only glance superficially at the statistics of English pauperism to find that the quantity of paupers increases with every crisis of trade, and diminishes with every revival. Second, orphans and pauper children. These are candidates for the industrial reserve army, and in times of great prosperity, such as the year 1860, for instance, they are enrolled in the army of active workers both speedily and in large numbers. Third, the demoralized, the ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, an incapacity which results from the division of labour; people who have lived beyond the worker’s average life-span; and the victims of industry, whose number increases with the growth of dangerous machinery, of mines, chemical works, etc., the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, etc. Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population, its necessity is implied by their necessity; along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It forms part of the faux frais* of capitalist production: but capital usually knows how to transfer these from its own shoulders to those of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie.

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws, it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here.

We can now understand the foolishness of the economic wisdom which preaches to the workers that they should adapt their numbers to the valorization requirements of capital. The mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation itself constantly effects this adjustment. The first word of this adaptation is the creation of a relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army. Its last word is the misery of constantly expanding strata of the active army of labour, and the dead weight of pauperism.

On the basis of capitalism, a system in which the worker does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the worker, the law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production may be set in motion by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, thanks to the advance in the productivity of social labour, undergoes a complete inversion, and is expressed thus: the higher the productivity of labour, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the condition for their existence, namely the sale of their own labour-power for the increase of alien wealth, or in other words the self-valorization of capital. The fact that the means of production and the productivity of labour increase more rapidly than the productive population expresses itself, therefore, under capitalism, in the inverse form that the working population always increases more rapidly than the valorization requirements of capital.

We saw in Part IV, when analysing the production of relative surplus-value, that within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; that all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate [entfremden] from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation, and every extension of accumulation becomes, conversely, a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. Finally, the law which always holds the relative surplus population or industrial reserve army in equilibrium with the extent and energy of accumulation rivets the worker to capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock. It makes an accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.

This antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation²³ is enunciated in various forms by political economists, although they lump it together with other phenomena which are admittedly to some extent analogous, but nevertheless essentially distinct, since they appear only in pre-capitalist modes of production.

The Venetian monk Ortes, one of the great economic writers of the eighteenth century, regards the antagonism of capitalist production as a universal natural law of social wealth. ‘In the economy of a nation, advantages and evils always balance each other’ (il bene ed il male económico in una nazione sempre all’istessa misura): ‘the abundance of wealth with some people is always equal to the lack of wealth with others’ (la copia dei beni in alcuni sempre eguale alia mancanza di essi in altri): ‘The great riches of a small number are always accompanied by the absolute deprivation of the essential necessities of life for many others. The wealth of a nation corresponds with its population, and its misery corresponds with its wealth. Diligence in some compels idleness in others. The poor and idle are a necessary consequence of the rich and active,’ and so on.²⁴ About ten years after Ortes, the High Church Protestant parson, Townsend, glorified misery as a necessary condition of wealth in a thoroughly brutal way. ‘Legal constraint’ (to labour) ‘is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise,… whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry and labour, it calls forth the most powerful exertions.’ Everything therefore depends on making hunger permanent among the working class, and this is provided for, according to Townsend, by the principle of population, which is especially applicable to the poor. ‘It seems to be a law of Nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident’ (i.e. so improvident as to be born without silver spoons in their mouths) ‘that there may always be some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved from drudgery… but are left at liberty without interruption to pursue those callings which are suited to their various dispositions… it’ (the Poor Law) ‘tends to destroy the harmony and beauty, the symmetry and order of that system which God and Nature have established in the world.’²⁵ If the Venetian monk found in the fatal destiny that makes misery eternal a justification for the existence of Christian charity, celibacy, monasteries and pious foundations, the beneficed Protestant finds in it a pretext for condemning the laws by which the poor possessed a right to a miserable amount of public relief.

‘The progress of social wealth,’ says Storch, ‘begets this useful class of society… which performs the most wearisome, the vilest, the most disgusting functions, which, in a word, takes on its shoulders all that is disagreeable and servile in life, and procures thus for other classes leisure, serenity of mind and conventional’ (c’est bon, ça)‘dignity of character.’²⁶ Storch then asks himself what the actual advantage is of this capitalist civilization, with its misery and its degradation of the masses, as compared with barbarism. He can find only one answer: security!

‘Thanks to the advance of industry and science,’ says Sismondi, ‘every worker can produce every day much more than he needs to consume. But at the same time, while his labour produces wealth, that wealth would, were he called on to consume it himself, make him less fit for labour.’ According to him, ‘men’ (i.e. non-workers) ‘would probably prefer to do without all artistic perfection, and all the enjoyments that industry procures for us, if it were necessary that all should buy them by constant toil like that of the worker… Exertion today is separated from its recompense; it is not the same man that first works, and then reposes; but it is because the one works that the other rests… The indefinite multiplication of the productive powers of labour can have no other result than the increase of luxury and enjoyment on the part of the idle rich.’²⁷

And finally, that fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire Destutt de Tracy makes the point in the most brutal fashion: ‘In poor nations the people are comfortable, in rich nations they are generally poor.’²⁸

Illustrations of the general law of capitalist accumulation

England from 1846 to 1866

No period of modern society is so favourable for the study of capitalist accumulation as the period of the last twenty years. It is as if Fortunatus’s purse* had been discovered. But of all countries England again provides the classical example, because it holds the foremost place in the world market, because capitalist production is fully developed only in England, and finally because the introduction of the free-trade millennium since 1846 has cut off the last retreat of vulgar economics. We have already sufficiently indicated the titanic progress of production in Part IV; in fact, in the latter half of the twenty-year period under discussion it has gone far beyond its progress in the former half.

Although the absolute growth of the English population in the last half century has been very great, the relative increase or rate of growth has fallen constantly, as is shown by the following table, borrowed from the census, which gives the average annual increase of the population of England and Wales over successive ten-year periods:

Annual percentage growth of the population of England and Wales, decimals

Year range	per cent
1811–21	1.533%
1821–31	1.446%
1831–41	1.326%
1841–51	1.216%
1851–61	1.141%

Let us now, on the other hand, consider the increase of wealth. Here the movement of profits, ground rent, etc., which are subject to income tax, provides the surest basis. The increase of profits liable to income tax in Great Britain from 1853 to 1864 (farmers and some other categories not included) amounted to 50.47 per cent (or an annual average of 4.58 per cent),²⁹ while the population itself increased during the same period by about 12 per cent. The augmentation of the rent of land subject to taxation (including houses, railways, mines, fisheries, etc.) amounted for 1853 to 1864 to 38 per cent, or 3 5/12 per cent annually. Under this heading, the following categories showed the greatest increase:³⁰

	Percentage excess of annual income of 1864 over that of 1853	Percentage increase per year
Houses	38.60%	3.50%
Quarries	84.76%	7.70%
Mines	68.85%	6.26%
Ironworks	39.92%	3.63%
Fisheries	57.37%	5.21%
Gasworks	126.02%	11.45%
Railways	83.29%	7.57%

If we compare the years from 1853 to 1864 in three sets of four consecutive years each, the rate of increase of these incomes accelerates constantly. Incomes arising from profits increased between 1853 and 1857 at 1–73 per cent a year; 1857–61,2.74 per cent, and 1861–4, 9.30 per cent a year. The sum of the incomes of the United Kingdom that come under the income tax was, in 1856, £307,068,898; in 1859, £328,127,416; in 1862, £351,745,241; in 1863, £359,142,897; in 1864, £362,462,279; in 1865, £385,530,020.³¹ The accumulation of capital was accompanied at the same time by its concentration and centralization. Although no official statistics of agriculture existed for England (they did for Ireland) they were voluntarily given in ten counties. It emerged from these statistics that between 1851 and 1861 the number of farms of less than 100 acres had fallen from 31,583 to 26,597, so that 5,016 had been thrown together into larger farms.³² From 1815 to 1825 no personal estate of more than £1,000,000 came under the succession duty; from 1825 to 1855, however, eight did; and from 1856 to June 1859, i.e. in 4 1/2 years, four did.³³ The centralization will best be seen, however, from a short analysis of the Income Tax Schedule D (profits, exclusive of farms, etc.), in the years 1864 and 1865.1 note in advance that incomes from this source pay income tax on everything over £60. These taxable incomes amounted in England, Wales and Scotland in 1864 to £95,844,222, and in 1865 to £105,435,579.³⁴ The number of persons taxed was, in 1864, 308,416 out of a population of 23,891,009; in 1865, 332,431 out of a population of 24,127,003. The following table shows the distribution of these incomes in the two years:

	Year ending 5 April 1864		Year ending 5 April 1865
	Income from profits (£)	Persons	Income from profits (£)	Persons
Total income of persons in this category	95,844,222	308,416	105,435,738	332,431
	57,028,289	23,334	64,554,297	24,265
	36,415,225	3,619	42,535,576	4,021
	22,809,781	832	27,555,313	973
	8,744,762	91	11,077,238	107

In 1855 there were produced in the United Kingdom 61,543,079 tons of coal, of value £16,113,167; in 1864, 92,787,873 tons, of value £23,197,968; in 1855, 3,218,154 tons of pig-iron, of value £8,045,385; in 1864, 4,767,951 tons, of value £11,919,877. In 1854 the length of railways in use in the United Kingdom was 8,054 miles, with a paid-up capital of £286,068,794; in 1864 the length was 12,789 miles, with a paid-up capital of £425,719,613. In 1854 the total sum of the exports and imports of the United Kingdom was £268,210,145; in 1865, £489,923,285. The following table shows the movement of exports:

1846	£58,842,377
1849	£63,596,052
1856	£115,826,948
1860	£135,842,817
1865	£165,862,402
1866	£188,917,56335

After these few examples one understands the cry of triumph uttered by the Registrar-General: ‘Rapidly as the population has increased, it has not kept pace with the progress of industry and wealth.’³⁶ Let us now turn to the direct agents of this industry, or the producers of this wealth, the working class. ‘It is one of the most melancholy features in the social state of this country,’ says Gladstone, ‘that we see, beyond the possibility of denial, that while there is at this moment a decrease in the consuming powers of the people, an increase of the pressure of privations and distress’ (upon the working class) ‘there is at the same time a constant accumulation of wealth in the upper classes, an increase of the luxuriousness of their habits, and of their means of enjoyment’ (and a constant increase of capital).³⁷ Thus spake this unctuous minister in the House of Commons on 13 February 1843. On 16 April 1863, twenty years later, in the speech in which he introduced his Budget, he said: ‘From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent… In the eight years from 1853 to 1861 it had increased from the basis taken in 1853 by 20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing as to be almost incredible… this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power… entirely confined to classes of property… must be of indirect benefit to the labouring population, because it cheapens commodities of general consumption. While the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor. At any rate, whether the extremes of poverty are less, I do not presume to say.’³⁸ How lame an anticlimax! If the working class has remained ‘poor’, only ‘less poor’ in proportion as it produces for the wealthy class ‘an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power’, then it has remained relatively just as poor. If the extremes of poverty have not lessened, they have increased, because the extremes of wealth have. As for the cheapening of the means of subsistence, the official statistics, for instance the accounts of the London Orphan Asylum, show an increase in price of 20 per cent over the last ten years, if we compare the average of the three years 1860 to 1862 with the average of 1851 to 1853. In the following three years, 1863 to 1865, there was a progressive rise in the price of meat, butter, milk, sugar, salt, coal and a number of other necessary means of subsistence.³⁹Gladstone’s next Budget speech of 7 April 1864 is a Pindaric dithyramb on the progress of surplus-value extraction and the happiness of the people, moderated by ‘poverty’. He speaks of masses ‘on the border of pauperism’, of branches of trade in which ‘wages have not increased’, and finally sums up the happiness of the working class in the words: ‘human life is but, in nine cases out often, a struggle for existence’.⁴⁰ Professor Fawcett, not bound like Gladstone by official considerations, declares roundly: ‘I do not, of course, deny that money wages have been augmented by this increase of capital’ (in the last ten years) ‘but this apparent advantage is to a great extent lost, because many of the necessaries of life are becoming dearer’ (he believes that this is because of the fall in value of the precious metals)… ‘the rich grow rapidly richer, whilst there is no perceptible advance in the comfort enjoyed by the industrial classes… They’ (the workers) ‘become almost the slaves of the tradesman, to whom they owe money.’⁴¹

In the chapters on the ‘Working Day’ and ‘Machinery’ the reader has seen the circumstances under which the British working class created an ‘intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power’ for the possessing classes. There we were chiefly concerned with the worker while he was exercising his social function. But for a full elucidation of the law of accumulation, his condition outside the workshop must also be looked at, his condition as to food and accommodation. The limits of this book compel us to concern ourselves chiefly with the worst paid part of the industrial proletariat and the agricultural labourers, who together form the majority of the working class.

But before this, just one word about official pauperism, or the part of the working class which has forfeited its condition of existence (the sale of labour-power), and vegetates on public alms. The official list of paupers in England⁴² numbered 851,369 persons in 1855; 877,767 in 1856; and 971,433 in 1865. As a result of the cotton famine, it swelled to 1,079,382 in 1863 and 1,014,978 in 1864. The crisis of 1866, which hit London most severely, created there, in the centre of the world market, a city with more inhabitants than the kingdom of Scotland, an increase of pauperism for the year 1866 of 19.5 per cent compared with 1865, and of 24.4 per cent compared with 1864, and a still greater increase for the first months of 1867 as compared with 1866. Two points emerge clearly when we analyse the statistics of pauperism. On the one hand, the rise and fall of the number of paupers reflects the periodic changes of the industrial cycle. On the other, the official statistics become more and more misleading as to the actual extent of pauperism in proportion as, with the accumulation of capital, the class struggle develops, and hence the class-consciousness of the workers as well. For example, the barbarous nature of the treatment of the paupers, at which the English press (The Times, Pall Mall Gazette, etc.) has cried out so loudly during the last two years, is in fact of ancient date. F. Engels, in 1844, demonstrated exactly the same horrors, and exactly the same transient, canting outcries of ‘sensational literature’.* But the frightful increase in the number of deaths by starvation in London during the last ten years proves beyond doubt the growing horror in which the workers hold the slavery of the workhouse,⁴³ that place of punishment for poverty.

The badly paid strata of the British Industrial Working Class

During the cotton famine of 1862[–3], Dr Edward Smith was charged by the Privy Council to make an investigation into the conditions of nourishment of the distressed cotton workers of Lancashire and Cheshire. His observations during many preceding years had led him to the conclusion that ‘to avert starvation diseases’ the daily food of an average woman ought to contain at least 3,900 grains of carbon and 180 grains of nitrogen; the daily food of an average man, at least 4,300 grains of carbon and 200 grains of nitrogen; for women, about the same quantity of nutritive elements as are contained in 2 lb. of good wheaten bread, for men 1/9 more; for the weekly average of adult men and women, at least 28,600 grains of carbon and 1,330 grains of nitrogen. His calculation was practically confirmed in a surprising manner by its agreement with the miserable quantity of nourishment to which the emergency had reduced the consumption of the cotton workers. This was, in December 1862. 29,211 grains of carbon and 1,295 grains of nitrogen a week.

In 1863, the Privy Council ordered an investigation into the state of distress of the worst-nourished part of the English working class. Dr Simon, medical officer to the Privy Council, chose for this work the above-mentioned Dr Smith. His inquiry covers on the one hand the agricultural labourers, on the other hand silk-weavers, needlewomen, kid-glovers, stocking-weavers, glove-weavers and shoemakers. The latter categories are, with the exception of the stocking-weavers, exclusively town-dwellers. It was made a rule in the inquiry to select in each category the most healthy families, and those comparatively in the best circumstances.

As a general result it was found that ‘in only one of the examined classes of indoor operatives did the average nitrogen supply just exceed, while in another it nearly reached, the estimated standard of bare sufficiency’ (i.e. sufficient to avert starvation diseases) ‘and that in two classes there was defect – in one, a very large defect – of both nitrogen and carbon. Moreover, as regards the examined families of the agricultural population, it appeared that more than a fifth were with less than the estimated sufficiency of carbonaceous food, that more than one-third were with less than the estimated sufficiency of nitrogenous food, and that in three counties (Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire), insufficiency of nitrogenous food was the average local that.’⁴⁴ Among the agricultural labourers, those of England, the wealthiest part of the United Kingdom, were the worst fed.⁴⁵ The insufficiency of food among the agricultural labourers fell as a rule chiefly on the women and children, for ‘the man must eat to do his work’. Still greater penury ravaged the urban workers he examined. ‘They are so ill fed that assuredly among them there must be many cases of severe and injurious privation.’⁴⁶ (This is all ‘abstinence’ on the part of the capitalist! For it is ‘abstinence’ from paying for the means of subsistence absolutely necessary for the mere vegetation of his ‘hands’.)

The following table shows the conditions of nourishment of the above-named categories of purely town-dwelling workers, as compared with the minimum assumed by Dr Smith, and with the food-allowance of the cotton workers during the time of their greatest distress:⁴⁷

(Both sexes)	Average weekly carbon (in grains)	Average weekly nitrogen (in grains)
Five indoor occupations	28,876	1,192
Unemployed Lancashire operatives	28,211	1,295
Minimum quantity to be allowed to the Lancashire operatives, equal number of males and females	28,600	1,330

Just under one-half (60/125) of the categories of industrial worker investigated had absolutely no beer, and 28 per cent no milk. The weekly average of liquid means of nourishment in the families varied from seven ounces in the case of the needlewomen to 24 3/4 ounces in the case of the stocking-makers. The majority of those who did not obtain milk were needlewomen in London. The quantity of bread consumed weekly varied from 7 3/4 lb. for the needlewomen to 11 1/2 lb. for the shoemakers, and gave a total average of 9.9 lb. per adult weekly. Sugar (treacle, etc.) varied from 4 ounces weekly for the kid-glovers to 11 ounces for the stocking-makers; and the total average per week for all categories was 8 ounces per adult per week. The total weekly average butter intake (fat, etc.) was 5 ounces per adult. The weekly average of meat (bacon, etc.) varied from 7 1/4 ounces for the silk-weavers to 18 1/4 ounces for the kid-glovers; total average for the different categories, 13.6 ounces. The weekly cost of food per adult was expressed in the following average figures: silk-weavers 2s. 2 1/2d., needlewomen 2s. 7d., kid-glovers 2s. 9 1/2d., shoemakers 2s. 7 3/4d., stocking-weavers 2s. 6 1/4d. For the silk-weavers of Macclesfield the average was only 1s. 8 1/2d. The worst-nourished categories were the needlewomen, silk-weavers and kid-glovers.⁴⁸ In his General Health Report, Dr Simon says this about the state of nourishment: ‘That cases are innumerable in which defective diet is the cause or the aggravator of disease can be affirmed by any one who is conversant with poor law medical practice, or with the wards and out-patient rooms of hospitals… Yet in this point of view there is, in my opinion, a very important sanitary context to be added. It must be remembered that privation of food is very reluctantly borne, and that as a rule great poorness of diet will only come when other privations have preceded it. Long before insufficiency of diet is a matter of hygienic concern, long before the physiologist would think of counting the grains of nitrogen and carbon which intervene between life and starvation, the household will have been utterly destitute of material comfort; clothing and fuel will have been even scantier than food – against inclemencies of weather there will have been no adequate protection – dwelling space will have been stinted to the degree in which over-crowding produces or increases disease; of household utensils and furniture there will have been scarcely any – even cleanliness will have been found costly or difficult, and if there still be self-respectful endeavours to maintain it, every such endeavour will represent additional pangs of hunger. The home, too, will be where shelter can be cheapest bought; in quarters where commonly there is least fruit of sanitary supervision, least drainage, least scavenging, least suppression of public nuisances, least or worst water supply, and, if in town, least light and air. Such are the sanitary dangers to which poverty is almost certainly exposed, when it is poverty enough to imply scantiness of food. And while the sum of them is of terrible magnitude against life, the mere scantiness of food is in itself of very serious moment… These are painful reflections, especially when it is remembered that the poverty to which they advert is not the deserved poverty of idleness. In all cases it is the poverty of working populations. Indeed, as regards the indoor operatives, the work which obtains the scanty pittance of food, is for the most part excessively prolonged. Yet evidently it is only in a qualified sense that the work can be deemed self-supporting… And on a very large scale the nominal self-support can be only a circuit, longer or shorter, to pauperism.’⁴⁹

The intimate connection between the pangs of hunger suffered by the most industrious layers of the working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which capitalist accumulation is the basis, is only uncovered when the economic laws are known. It is otherwise with the housing situation. Every unprejudiced observer sees that the greater the centralization of the means of production, the greater is the corresponding concentration of workers within a given space; and therefore the more quickly capitalist accumulation takes place, the more miserable the housing situation of the working class. ‘Improvements’ of towns which accompany the increase of wealth, such as the demolition of badly built districts, the erection of palaces to house banks, warehouses etc., the widening of streets for business traffic, for luxury carriages, for the introduction of tramways, obviously drive the poor away into even worse and more crowded corners. On the other hand, everyone knows that the dearness of houses stands in inverse ratio to their quality, and that the mines of misery are exploited by house speculators with more profit and at less cost than the mines of Potosi were ever exploited. The antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation, and thus of capitalist property-relations in general,⁵⁰ is here so evident that even the official English reports on this subject teem with heterodox onslaughts on ‘property and its rights’. This evil makes such progress alongside the development of industry, the accumulation of capital and the growth and ‘improvement’ of towns that the sheer fear of contagious diseases, which do not spare even ‘respectable people’, brought into existence from 1847 to 1864 no less than ten Acts of Parliament on sanitation, and that the frightened middle classes in certain towns, such as Liverpool, Glasgow and so on, took strenuous measures to deal with the problem through their municipalities. Nevertheless, Dr Simon says in his report of 1865: ‘Speaking generally, it may be said that the evils are uncontrolled in England.’ By order of the Privy Council, in 1864, an inquiry was made into the condition of the housing of agricultural labourers, and in 1865 the same thing was done for the poorer classes of the towns. The results of the admirable work of Dr Julian Hunter are to be found in the seventh (1865) and eighth (1866) Reports on Public Health. I shall come back to the agricultural labourers later on. On the condition of urban dwellings, I quote, as a preliminary, a general remark made by Dr Simon. ‘Although my official point of view,’ he says, ‘is one exclusively physical, common humanity requires that the other aspect of this evil should not be ignored… In its higher degrees it’ (i.e. overcrowding) ‘almost necessarily involves such negation of all delicacy, such unclean confusion of bodies and bodily functions, such exposure of animal and sexual nakedness, as is rather bestial than human. To be subject to these influences is a degradation which must become deeper and deeper for those on whom it continues to work. To children who are born under its curse, it must often be a very baptism into infamy. And beyond all measure hopeless is the wish that persons thus circumstanced should ever in other respects aspire to that atmosphere of civilization which has its essence in physical and moral cleanliness.’⁵¹

London takes the first place in overcrowded habitations, absolutely unfit for human beings. ‘I feel clear,’ says Dr Hunter, ‘on two points; first, that there are about twenty large colonies in London, of about 10,000 persons each, whose miserable condition exceeds almost anything I have seen elsewhere in England, and is almost entirely the result of their bad house accommodation; and second, that the crowded and dilapidated condition of the houses of these colonies is much worse than was the case twenty years ago.’⁵² ‘It is not too much to say that life in parts of London and Newcastle is infernal.’⁵³

Furthermore, the better-off part of the working class, together with the small shopkeepers and other elements of the lower middle class, falls in London more and more under the curse of these vile housing conditions, in proportion as ‘improvements’, and with them the demolition of old streets and houses, advance, in proportion as factories spring up and the influx of people into the metropolis grows, and finally in proportion as house rents rise owing to increases in urban ground rent. ‘Rents have become so heavy that few labouring men can afford more than one room.’⁵⁴ There is almost no house property in London that is not over burdened with a number of middlemen. For the price of land in London is always very high in comparison with its yearly revenue, and therefore every buyer speculates on getting rid of it again at a ‘jury price’ (the expropriation valuation fixed by jurymen), or on pocketing an extraordinary increase of value arising from the proximity of some large-scale undertaking. As a result of this, there is a regular trade in the purchase of ‘fag-ends of leases’. ‘Gentlemen in this business may be fairly expected to do as they do – get all they can from the tenants while they have them, and leave as little as they can for their successors.’⁵⁵

The rents are weekly, and these gentlemen run no risk. Owing to the construction of railways within the city, ‘the spectacle has lately been seen in the East of London of a number of families wandering about some Saturday night with their scanty worldly goods on their backs, without any resting place but the workhouse.’⁵⁶ The workhouses are already overcrowded, and the ‘improvements’ already sanctioned by Parliament have only just begun. If the workers are driven away by the demolition of their old houses, they either do not leave the old parish, or at the most they settle down on its borders, as near as they can get to it. ‘They try, of course, to remain as near as possible to their workshops. The inhabitants do not go beyond the same or the next parish, parting their two-room tenements into single rooms, and crowding even those… Even at an advanced rent, the people who are displaced will hardly be able to get an accommodation so good as the meagre one they have left… Half the workmen… of the Strand… walked two miles to their work. ‘This same Strand, a main thoroughfare which gives strangers an imposing idea of the wealth of London, may serve as an example of the way human beings are packed together in that city. In one of its parishes, the Public Health Officer reckoned 581 persons per acre, although half the width of the Thames was included in the parish. It will of course be understood that all the measures for the improvement of public health which have been taken so far in London have in fact, by demolishing uninhabitable houses, driven the workers out of some districts only to crowd them together still more closely in other districts. ‘Either,’ says Dr Hunter, ‘the whole proceeding will of necessity stop as an absurdity, or the public compassion (!) be effectually aroused to the obligation which may now be without exaggeration called national, of supplying cover to those who will provide it for them.’⁵⁷Capitalist justice is truly to be wondered at! The owner of land and houses, the businessman, when expropriated by ‘improvements’ such as railways, the building of new streets, etc., does not just receive full compensation. He must also be comforted, both according to human law and divine law, by receiving a substantial profit in return for his compulsory ‘abstinence’. The worker, with his wife and child and chattels, is thrown out into the street, and, if he crowds in too large numbers near districts where the local authority insists on decency, he is prosecuted in the name of public health!

Except London, there was at the beginning of the nineteenth century no single town in England of more than 100,000 inhabitants. Only five had more than 50,000. Now there are twenty-eight towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants. ‘The result of this change is not only that the class of town people is enormously increased, but the old close-packed little towns are now centres built round on every side, open nowhere to air, and being no longer agreeable to the rich are abandoned by them for the pleasanter outskirts. The successors of these rich are occupying the larger houses at the rate of a family to each room… and find accommodation for two or three lodgers… and a population, for which the houses were not intended and quite unfit, has been created, whose surroundings are truly degrading to the adults and ruinous to the children.’⁵⁸ The more rapidly capital accumulates in an industrial or commercial town, the more rapidly flows the stream of exploitable human material, the more miserable are the improvised dwellings of the workers.

Newcastle-on-Tyne, as the centre of a coal and iron district which is becoming more and more productive, takes second place after London in the housing inferno. Not less than 34,000 persons live there in single rooms. Because of their absolute danger to the community, houses in great numbers have recently been pulled down by the authorities in Newcastle and Gateshead. The building of new houses progresses very slowly, business very quickly. The town was therefore more full than ever in 1865. There was scarcely a room to let. Dr Embleton, of the Newcastle Fever Hospital, says: ‘There can be little doubt that the great cause of the continuance and spread of the typhus has been the over-crowding of human beings, and the uncleanliness of their dwellings. The rooms, in which labourers in many cases live, are situated in confined and unwholesome yards or courts, and for space, light, air, and cleanliness, are models of insufficiency and insalubrity, and a disgrace to any civilized community; in them, men, women, and children lie at night huddled together; and as regards the men, the night-shift succeed the day-shift, and the day-shiñ the night-shift, in unbroken series for some time together, the beds having scarcely time to cool; the whole house badly supplied with water and worse with privies; dirty, unventilated, and pestiferous.’⁵⁹ The price per week of such lodgings ranges from 8d. to 3s. ‘The town of Newcastle-on-Tyne,’ says Dr Hunter, ‘contains a sample of the finest tribe of our countrymen, often sunk by external circumstances of house and street into an almost savage degradation.’⁶⁰

As a result of the ebb and flow of capital and labour, the state of the dwellings of an industrial town may today be tolerable, tomorrow frightful. Or the local magistracy of the town may have summoned up the energy to remove the most shocking abuses. The next day, masses of ragged Irishmen or decayed English agricultural labourers may come crowding in, like a swarm of locusts. They are stowed away in cellars and lofts, or a hitherto respectable working-class dwelling is transformed into a lodging-house whose personnel changes as quickly as soldiers’ quarters in the Thirty Years War. Take Bradford for example. There the municipal philistine had just been engaged in making improvements to the town. Besides, there were still 1,751 uninhabited houses in Bradford in 1861. But now comes that revival of trade which the sweet-natured Liberal Mr Forster, the Negro’s friend, recently crowed over so gracefully.* With the revival of trade there naturally occurred an overflow from the wages of the ever-fluctuating ‘reserve army’ or ‘relative surplus population’. The frightful cellar habitations and rooms registered in the list,⁶¹ which Dr Hunter obtained from the agent of an insurance company, were for the most part inhabited by well-paid workers. They declared that they would willingly pay for better dwellings if they were to be had. Meanwhile they become degraded and fall ill, every man jack of them, while that sweet-natured Liberal, Forster M.P., sheds tears of joy over the blessings of free trade, and the profits of the eminent men of Bradford who deal in worsted. In the report of 5 September 1865, Dr Bell, one of the poor law doctors of Bradford, ascribes the frightful mortality of fever patients in his district to the conditions in which they live. ‘In one small cellar measuring 1,500 cubic feet… there are ten persons… Vincent Street, Green Aire Place, and the Leys include 223 houses having 1,450 inhabitants, 453 beds, and 36 privies… The beds – and in that term I include any roll of dirty old rags, or an armful of shavings – have an average of 3.3 persons to each, many have 5 and 6 persons to each, and some people, I am told, are absolutely without beds; they sleep in their ordinary clothes, on the bare boards – young men and women, married and unmarried, all together. I need scarcely add that many of these dwellings are dark, damp, dirty, stinking holes, utterly unfit for human habitations; they are the centres from which disease and death are distributed amongst those in better circumstances, who have allowed them thus to fester in our midst.’⁶²

Bristol takes the third place after London in the misery of its dwellings. ‘Bristol, where the blankest poverty and domestic misery abound in the wealthiest town of Europe.’⁶³

The nomadic population

We now turn to a group of people whose origin is rural, but whose occupation is for the most part industrial. They are the light infantry of capital, thrown from one point to another according to its present needs. When they are not on the march they ‘camp’. Nomadic labour is used for various building and draining works, for brick-making, lime-burning, railway-making, etc. A flying column of pestilence, it carries smallpox, typhus, cholera and scarlet fever into the places in whose neighbourhood it pitches its camp.⁶⁴ In undertakings which involve a large outlay of capital, such as railways etc., the contractor himself generally provides his army with wooden huts and so on, thus improvising villages which lack all sanitary arrangements, are outside the control of the local authorities, and are very profitable to the gentleman who is doing the contracting, for he exploits his workers in two directions at once – as soldiers of industry, and as tenants. Depending on whether the wooden hut contains one, two or three holes, its inhabitant, the navvy or whatever he may be, has to pay 2,3 or 4 shillings a week.⁶⁵ One example will suffice. Dr Simon reports that in September 1864 the Chairman of the Nuisances Removal Committee of the parish of Sevenoaks sent the following denunciation to Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary: ‘Small-pox cases were rarely heard of in this parish until about twelve months ago. Shortly before that time, the works for a railway from Lewisham to Tun-bridge were commenced here, and, in addition to the principal works being in the immediate neighbourhood of this town, here was also established the depot for the whole of the works, so that a large number of persons was of necessity employed here. As cottage accommodation could not be obtained for them all, huts were built in several places along the line of the works by the contractor, Mr Jay, for their especial occupation. These huts possessed no ventilation nor drainage, and, besides, were necessarily over-crowded, because each occupant had to accommodate lodgers, whatever the number in his own family might be, although there were only two rooms to each tenement. The consequences were, according to the medical report we received, that in the night-time these poor people were compelled to endure all the horror of suffocation to avoid the pestiferous smells arising from the filthy, stagnant water, and the privies close under their windows. Complaints were at length made to the Nuisances Removal Committee by a medical gentleman who had occasion to visit these huts, and he spoke of their condition as dwellings in the most severe terms, and he expressed his fears that some very serious consequences might ensue, unless some sanitary measures were adopted. About a year ago, Mr Jay promised to appropriate a hut, to which persons in his employ, who were suffering from contagious diseases, might at once be removed. He repeated that promise on the 23rd July last, but although since the date of the last promise there have been several cases of small-pox in his huts, and two deaths from the same disease, yet he has taken no steps whatever to carry out his promise. On the 9th September instant, Mr Kelson, surgeon, reported to me further cases of small-pox in the same huts, and he described their condition as most disgraceful. I should add, for your’ (the Minister’s) ‘information that an isolated house, called the Pest-house, which is set apart for parishioners who might be suffering from infectious diseases, has been continually occupied by such patients for many months past, and is also now occupied; that in one family five children died from small-pox and fever; that from the 1st April to the 1st September this year, a period of five months, there have been no fewer than ten deaths from small-pox in the parish, four of them being in the huts already referred to; that it is impossible to ascertain the exact number of persons who have suffered from that disease although they are known to be many, from the fact of the families keeping it as private as possible.’⁶⁶

Workers in coal and other mines belong to the best paid categories of the British proletariat. The price they pay for their wages was shown on an earlier page.⁶⁷ Here I shall merely glance at their housing conditions. As a rule, the exploiter of a mine, whether he is the proprietor or a tenant, builds a number of cottages for his ‘hands’. They receive cottages and coal for firing ‘for nothing’ – i.e. these form part of their wages, paid in kind. Those who cannot be housed in this way receive in compensation £4 per annum. The mining districts rapidly attract a large population, made up of the miners themselves and the artisans, shopkeepers, etc. who group themselves around them. The ground rent is high, as it generally is where population is dense. The mining employer therefore tries to put up, within the smallest space possible at the entrance to the pit, exactly the number of cottages necessary to pack together his workers and their families. If new mines are opened in the neighbourhood, or old ones are again set working, the pressure increases. In the construction of the cottages, only one point of view is of significance, the ‘abstinence’ of the capitalist from all expenditure that is not absolutely unavoidable. ‘The lodging which is obtained by the pitmen and other labourers connected with the collieries of Northumberland and Durham,’ says Dr Julian Hunter, ‘is perhaps, on the whole, the worst and the dearest of which any large specimens can be found in England, the similar parishes of Monmouthshire excepted… The extreme badness is in the high number of men found in one room, in the smallness of the ground-plot on which a great number of houses are thrust, the want of water, the absence of privies, and the frequent placing of one house on the top of another, or distribution into flats,… the lessee acts as if the whole colony were encamped, not resident.’⁶⁸ ‘In pursuance of my instructions,’ says Dr Stevens, ‘I visited most of the large colliery villages in the Durham Union… With very few exceptions, the general statement that no means are taken to secure the health of the inhabitants would be true of all of them… All colliers are bound’ (’bound’, an expression which, like ‘bondage’, dates from the age of serfdom) ‘to the colliery lessee or owner for twelve months… If the colliers express discontent, or in any way annoy the “viewer”, a mark of memorandum is made against their names, and, at the annual “binding”, such men are turned off… It appears to me that no part of the “truck system” could be worse than what obtains in these densely-populated districts. The collier is bound to take as part of his hiring a house surrounded with pestiferous influences; he cannot help himself, and it appears doubtful whether anyone else can help him except his proprietor (he is, to all intents and purposes, a serf), and his proprietor first consults his balance-sheet, and the result is tolerably certain. The collier is also often supplied with water by the proprietor, which, whether it be good or bad, he has to pay for, or rather he suffers a deduction for from his wages.’⁶⁹

In a conflict with ‘public opinion’, or even with the Officers of Health, capital has no difficulty in ‘justifying’ the partly dangerous and partly degrading conditions to which it confines the working and domestic life of the mine-worker, on the ground that they are necessary for profitable exploitation. It is the same thing when capital ‘abstains’ from protective measures against dangerous machinery in the factory, from safety appliances and means of ventilation in the mines, and so on. It is the same here with the housing of the miners. Dr Simon, medical officer of the Privy Council, says in his official report: ‘In apology for the wretched household accommodation… it is alleged that mines are commonly worked on lease; that the duration of the lessee’s interest (which in collieries is commonly for twenty-one years), is not so long that he should deem it worth his while to create good accommodation for his labourers, and for the tradespeople and others whom the work attracts; that even if he were disposed to act liberally in the matter, this disposition would commonly be defeated by his landlord’s tendency to fix on him, as ground-rent, an exorbitant additional charge for the privilege of having on the surface of the ground the decent and comfortable village which the labourers of the subterranean property ought to inhabit, and that prohibitory price (if not actual prohibition) equally excludes others who might desire to build. It would be foreign to the purpose of this report to enter upon any discussion of the merits of the above apology. Nor here is it even needful to consider where it would be that, if decent accommodation were provided, the cost… would eventually fall – whether on landlord, or lessee, or labourer, or public. But in presence of such shameful facts as are vouched for in the annexed reports’ (those of Dr Hunter, Dr Stevens, etc.) ‘a remedy may well be claimed… Claims of landlordship are being so used as to do great public wrong. The landlord in his capacity of mine-owner invites an industrial colony to labour on his estate, and then in his capacity of surface-owner makes it impossible that the labourers whom he collects, should find proper lodging where they must live. The lessee’ (the capitalist exploiter of the mine) ‘meanwhile has no pecuniary motive for resisting that division of the bargain; well knowing that if its latter conditions be exorbitant, the consequences fall not on him, that his labourers on whom they fall have not education enough to know the value of their sanitary rights, that neither obscenest lodging nor foulest drinking water will be appreciable inducements towards a “strike”.’⁷⁰

Effect of crises on the best paid section of the working class

Before I turn to the agricultural labourers, I shall just show, by one example, how crises have an impact even on the best paid section of the working class, on its aristocracy. It will be remembered that the year 1857 brought one of the gigantic crises with which the industrial cycle always terminates. The next crisis was due in 1866. Already discounted in the actual factory districts by the cotton famine, which threw much capital from its accustomed sphere into the great centres of the money-market, the crisis assumed this time a predominantly financial character. Its outbreak in May 1866 was signalled by the failure of a giant London bank, immediately followed by the collapse of countless swindling companies. One of the great London branches of industry involved in the catastrophe was iron shipbuilding. The magnates of this trade had not only overproduced beyond all measure during the swindling period,* but they had, apart from this, entered into enormous contracts on the speculative assumption that credit would be forthcoming to an equivalent extent. A terrible reaction then set in, which continues even now (at the end of March 1867) both in shipbuilding and in other London industries.⁷¹ Let me characterize the situation of the workers by quoting the following from a very detailed report by a correspondent of the Morning Star, who visited the chief centres of distress at the end of 1866 and the beginning of 1867: ‘In the East End districts of Poplar, Millwall, Greenwich, Deptford, Limehouse and Canning Town, at least 15,000 workmen and their families were in a state of utter destitution, and 3,000 skilled mechanics were breaking stones in the workhouse yard (after distress of over half a year’s duration)… I had great difficulty in reaching the workhouse door, for a hungry crowd besieged it… They were waiting for their tickets, but the time had not yet arrived for the distribution. The yard was a great square place with an open shed running all round it, and several large heaps of snow covered the paving-stones in the middle. In the middle, also, were little wicker-fenced spaces, like sheep pens, where in finer weather the men worked; but on the day of my visit the pens were so snowed up that nobody could sit in them. Men were busy, however, in the open shed breaking paving-stones into macadam. Each man had a big paving-stone for a seat, and he chipped away at the rime-covered granite until he had broken up, and think! five bushels of it, and then he had done his day’s work, and got his day’s pay – threepence and an allowance of food. In another part of the yard was a rickety little wooden house, and when we opened the door of it, we found it filled with men who were huddled together shoulder to shoulder, for the warmth of one another’s bodies and breath. They were picking oakum and disputing the while as to which could work the longest on a given quantity of food – for endurance was the point of honour. Seven thousand… in this one workhouse… were recipients of relief… many hundreds of them… it appeared, were, six or eight months ago, earning the highest wages paid to artisans… Their number would be more than doubled by the count of those who, having exhausted all their savings, still refuse to apply to the parish, because they have a little left to pawn. Leaving the workhouse, I took a walk through the streets, mostly of little one-storey houses, that abound in the neighbourhood of Poplar. My guide was a member of the Committee of the Unemployed… My first call was on an ironworker who had been seven and twenty weeks out of employment. I found the man with his family sitting in a little back room. The room was not bare of furniture, and there was a fire in it. This was necessary to keep the naked feet of the young children from getting frost bitten, for it was a bitterly cold day. On a tray infront of the fire lay a quantity of oakum, which the wife and children were picking in return for their allowance from the parish. The man worked in the stone yard of the workhouse for a certain ration of food, and threepence per day. He had now come home to dinner quite hungry, as he told us with a melancholy smile, and his dinner consisted of a couple of slices of bread and dripping, and a cup of milkless tea… The next door at which we knocked was opened by a middle-aged woman, who, without saying a word, led us into a little back parlour, in which sat all her family, silent and fixedly staring at a rapidly dying fire. Such desolation, such hopelessness was about these people and their little room, as I should not care to witness again. “Nothing have they done, sir,” said the woman, pointing to her boys, “for six and twenty weeks; and all our money gone – all the twenty pounds that me and father saved when times were better, thinking it would yield a little to keep us when we got past work. Look at it,” she said, almost fiercely, bringing out a bankbook with all its well-kept entries of money paid in, and money taken out, so that we could see how the little fortune had begun with the first five shilling deposit, and had grown by little and little to be twenty pounds, and how it had melted down again till the sum in hand got from pounds to shillings, and the last entry made the book as worthless as a blank sheet. This family received relief from the workhouse, and it furnished them with just one scanty meal per day… Our next visit was to an iron labourer’s wife, whose husband had worked in the yards. We found her ill from want of food, lying on a mattress in her clothes, and just covered with a strip of carpet, for all the bedding had been pawned. Two wretched children were tending her, themselves looking as much in need of nursing as their mother. Nineteen weeks of enforced idleness had brought them to this pass, and while the mother told the history of that bitter past, she moaned as if all her faith in a future that should atone for it were dead… On getting outside a young fellow came running after us, and asked us to step inside his house and see if anything could be done for him. A young wife, two pretty children, a cluster of pawn-tickets, and a bare room were all he had to show.’*

On the after-pains of the crisis of 1866, we shall quote an extract from a Tory newspaper. It must not be forgotten that the East End of London, which is dealt with here, is not only the location of the iron shipbuilding mentioned above, but also of the so-called domestic industry, which is always paid less than the minimum wage. ‘A frightful spectacle was to be seen yesterday in one part of the metropolis. Although the unemployed thousands of the East-end did not parade with their black flags en masse, the human torrent was imposing enough. Let us remember what these people suffer. They are dying of hunger. That is the simple and terrible fact. There are 40,000 of them… In our presence, in one quarter of this wonderful metropolis, are packed – next door to the most enormous accumulation of wealth the world ever saw – cheek by jowl with this are 40,000 helpless, starving people. These thousands are now breaking in upon the other quarters; always half-starving, they cry their misery in our ears, they cry to Heaven, they tell us from their miserable dwellings, that it is impossible for them to find work, and useless for them to beg. The local ratepayers themselves are driven by the parochial charges to the verge of pauperism’ (Standard, 5 April 1867).

As it is the fashion amongst English capitalists to quote Belgium as the workers’ paradise, because ‘freedom of labour’ or, what is the same thing, ‘freedom of capital’ is there limited neither by the despotism of the trade unions nor by the shackles of the Factory Acts, we shall say a word or two here about the ‘good fortune’ of the Belgian worker. Assuredly no one was more thoroughly initiated into the mysteries of this good fortune than the late M. Ducpétiaux, inspector-general of Belgian prisons and charitable institutions, and member of the Central Statistical Commission of Belgium. Let us take his work Budgets économiques des classes ouvrières de la Belgique (Brussels, 1855). Here we find, among other things, a discussion of a normal Belgian worker’s family, whose yearly income and expenditure he calculates on very exact data, and whose conditions of nourishment are then compared with those of the soldier, the sailor and the prisoner. The family ‘consists of father, mother, and four children’. Of these six persons, ‘four may be usefully employed the whole year through’. It is assumed that ‘there is no sick person among them, or anyone incapable of work’, nor are there ‘expenses for religious, moral and intellectual purposes, except a very small sum for church pews’, nor contributions to savings banks or benefit societies, ‘nor expenses due to luxury or the result of improvidence’. The father and eldest son, however, allow themselves ‘the use of tobacco’, and on Sundays ‘go to the ale-house’, for which a whole 86 centimes a week are reckoned. ‘From a general compilation of wages allowed to workers in different trades, it follows that the highest average daily wage is 1 franc 56 centimes for men, 89 centimes for women, 56 centimes for boys, and 55 centimes for girls. Calculated at this rate, the resources of the family would amount, at the maximum, to 1,068 francs a year… In the family taken as typical we have calculated all possible resources. In ascribing wages to the mother of the family, however, we thereby remove the household from her management. But who will look after the house and the young children? Who will prepare the meals, do the washing and mending? This is the dilemma presented every day to the workers.’ According to this the budget of the family is:

	Highest average daily wage	300 working days
The father	1.56 francs	468
The mother	89 francs	267
The boy	56 francs	168
The girl	55 francs	165
Total		1,068

The annual expenditure of the family would result in the following deficits, according to whether the worker has the food of:

The sailor in the fleet	fr. 1,828	Deficit fr.	760
The soldier	fr. 1,473	Deficit fr.	405
The prisoner	fr. 1,112	Deficit fr.	44

‘We see that few workers’ families can reach, we will not say the average of the sailor or soldier, but even that of the prisoner. The general average (of the cost of each prisoner in the different prisons during the period 1847 to 1849), has been 63 centimes for all prisons. This figure, compared with that of the daily maintenance of the worker, shows a difference of 13 centimes. It must be remarked further that if in the prisons it is necessary to set down in the account the expenses of administration and surveillance, on the other hand, the prisoners do not have to pay for their lodgings… How does it happen, then, that a great number, we might say the great majority of workers, live even more economically than prisoners? It is because they adopt expedients whose secrets are only known by the workers: they reduce their daily rations; they substitute rye-bread for wheat; they eat less meat, or even none at all, and the same with butter and condiments; they content themselves with one or two rooms where the family is crammed together, where boys and girls sleep side by side, often on the same mattress; they economize on clothing, washing, and decency; they give up the diversions of Sunday; in short, they resign themselves to the most painful privations. Once this extreme limit has been reached, the least rise in the price of food, the shortest stoppage of work, the slightest illness, increases the worker’s distress and brings him to complete disaster: debts accumulate, credit fails, the most necessary clothes and furniture are pawned, and finally the family asks to be enrolled on the list of paupers.’⁷² In fact, in this ‘paradise for capitalists’, the smallest change in the prices of the most essential means of subsistence is followed by a change in the number of deaths and crimes! (See Manifest der Maatschappij ‘De Vlamingen Vooruit!’, Brussels, 1860, pp. 15–16.)*

There are 930,000 families in Belgium, of whom, according to the official statistics, 90,000 are wealthy and on the list of voters, i.e. 450,000 persons; 390,000 families of the lower middle class in towns and villages, the greater part of them constantly sinking into the proletariat, i.e. 1,950,000 persons. Finally, 450,000 working-class families, i.e. 2,250,000 persons, of whom the model ones enjoy the good fortune depicted by Ducpétiaux. Of the 450,000 working-class families, over 200,000 are on the pauper list!

The British agricultural proletariat

Nowhere does the antagonistic character of capitalist production and accumulation assert itself more brutally than in the progress of English agriculture (including cattle-breeding) and the retrogression of the English agricultural labourer. Before I turn to his present situation, a rapid look back. Modern agriculture dates in England from the middle of the eighteenth century, although the revolution in property relations on the land which is the basis of the altered mode of production occurred much earlier.

If we take the statements of Arthur Young, a careful observer though a superficial thinker, about the agricultural labourer of 1771, the latter plays a very pitiable role as compared with his predecessor of the end of the fourteenth century, ‘when the labourer… could live in plenty, and accumulate wealth’,⁷³ not to speak of the fifteenth century, ‘the golden age of the English labourer in town and country’. We need not, however, go back as far as that. In a very instructive book produced in 1777 we read: ‘The great farmer is nearly mounted to a level with him’ (the gentleman); ‘while the poor labourer is depressed almost to the earth. His unfortunate situation will fully appear, by taking a comparative view of it, only forty years ago, and at present… Landlord and tenant… have both gone hand in hand in keeping the labourer down.’⁷⁴ It is then proved in detail that real agricultural wages fell by nearly, 1/4 or 25 per cent, between 1737 and 1777. ‘Modern policy,’ as Dr Richard Price was saying at the same time, ‘is, indeed, more favourable to the higher classes of people; and the consequences may in time prove that the whole kingdom will consist of only gentry and beggars, or of grandees and slaves.’⁷⁵

Nevertheless, the position of the English agricultural labourer from 1770 to 1780, with respect to his food and dwelling, as well as his self-respect, amusements, etc., is an ideal never attained again since that time. His average wage expressed in pints of wheat was, from 1770 to 1771, 90 pints, in Eden’s time (1797) only 65, and in 1808, 60.⁷⁶

The state of the agricultural labourer at the end of the Anti-Jacobin War, during which landed proprietors, farmers, manufacturers, merchants, bankers, stockbrokers, army contractors and so on enriched themselves to such an enormous extent, has been already indicated above. The nominal wage rose, partly as a result of the depreciation of banknotes, and partly owing to a rise in the prices of the primary means of subsistence which occurred independently of this depreciation. But the real movement of wages can be demonstrated quite simply, without entering into details that are unnecessary here. The Poor Law was the same, and was administered in the same way, in 1795 and in 1814. It will be remembered how this law was put into effect in the country districts: in the form of alms, the parish made up the nominal wage to the nominal sum required for the simple vegetation of the labourer. The ratio between the wage paid by the farmer and the wage-deficit made good by the parish shows us two things. First, the fact that wages had fallen below their minimum; second, the degree to which the agricultural labourer was a combination of wage-labourer and pauper, or the degree to which he had been turned into a serf of his parish. Let us take one county that represents the average situation in all counties. In Northamptonshire, in 1795, the average weekly wage was 7s. 6d.; the total yearly expenditure of a family of six persons, £36 12s. 5d.; their total income, £29 18s.; deficit made good by the parish, £6 14s. 5d. In 1814, in the same county, the weekly wage was 12s. 2d.; the total yearly expenditure of a family of five persons £54 18s. 4d.; their total income, £36 2s.; deficit made good by the parish, £18 6s. 4d.⁷⁷ In 1795 the deficit was less than a quarter of the wage, in 1814 it was more than a half. It is self-evident that under these circumstances the meagre comforts that Eden still found in the cottage of the agricultural labourer had vanished by 1814.⁷⁸ Of all the animals kept by the farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocale,* was thenceforth the most oppressed, the worst nourished, the most brutally treated.

This state of affairs continued quietly until ‘the Swing riots, in 1830, revealed to us’ (i.e. to the ruling classes) ‘by the light of blazing corn-stacks, that misery and black mutinous discontent smouldered quite as fiercely under the surface of agricultural as of manufacturing England.’⁷⁹ It was at this time that Sadler, in the House of Commons, christened the agricultural labourers ‘white slaves’, and a bishop echoed the epithet in the House of Lords. The most notable political economist of that period – E. G. Wakefield – says: ‘The peasant of the South of England… is not a freeman, nor is he a slave; he is a pauper.’⁸⁰

The time just before the repeal of the Corn Laws threw new light on the condition of the agricultural labourers. On the one hand, it was in the interest of the middle-class agitators to prove how little the Corn Laws protected the actual producers of the corn. On the other hand, the industrial bourgeoisie was seething with wrath at the denunciations of the factory system made by the landed aristocracy, at the affectation of sympathy displayed by those utterly corrupt, heartless and genteel idlers for the woes of the factory workers, and at their ‘diplomatic zeal’ for factory legislation. There is an old English proverb to the effect that when thieves fall out, honest men come into their own, and in fact the noisy and passionate dispute between the two factions of the ruling class as to which of them exploited the workers more shamelessly was the midwife of truth on both sides of the question. Earl Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, was the protagonist of the aristocratic philanthropic campaign against the factories. He therefore formed a favourite target for the revelations of the Morning Chronicle in 1844 and 1845 on the condition of the agricultural labourers. This newspaper, at that time the most important Liberal organ, sent special commissioners into the agricultural districts, commissioners who did not content themselves with mere general descriptions and statistics, but published the names both of the families of labourers examined and of their landlords. The following list [p. 832] gives the wages paid in three villages in the neighbourhood of Blandford, Wimborne and Poole. The villages are the property of Mr G. Bankes and the Earl of Shaftesbury. It will be noted that, just like Bankes, the pope of the Low Church, the head of the English pietists, also pockets a large part of the miserable wages of the labourers under the pretext of the rent of their houses.

The repeal of the Corn Laws gave a marvellous impulse to English agriculture. Drainage on the most extensive scale,⁸² new methods of stall-feeding and the artificial cultivation of green crops, the introduction of mechanical manuring apparatus, new treatment of clay soils, increased use of mineral manures, employment of the steam-engine and all kinds of new machinery, more intensive cultivation in general, are all characteristic of this epoch. Mr Pusey, Chairman of the Royal Agricultural Society, declares that the (relative) expenses of farming have been reduced nearly 50 per cent by the introduction of new machinery. On the other hand, the actual productive return of the soil rose rapidly. Greater outlay of capital per acre, and as a consequence more rapid concentration of farms, were essential conditions of the new method.⁸³At the same time, the area under cultivation increased,

First Village ⁸¹

Children (a)	Number of members in family (b)	Weekly wage of the men (c)	Weekly wage of the children (d)		Weekly income of the whole family (e)		Weekly rent (f)		Total weekly wage after deduction of rent (g)		Weekly income per head (h)
		s.	s.	p.	s.	p.	s.	p.	s.	p.	s.	p.
First village
2	4	8	—		8	—	2	—	6	—	1	6
3	5	8	—		8	—	1	6	6	6	1	3 ½
2	4	8	—		8	—	1	—	7	—	1	9
2	4	8	—		8	—	1	—	7	6	1	¾
6	8	7	1	6	10	6	2	—	8	6	1	1 ½
3	5	7	2	—	7	—	1	4	5	8	1	1 ½
Second village
6	8	7	1	6	10	—	1	6	8	6	1	¾
6	8	7	1	6	7	—	1	3 ½	5	8 ½	—	8 ½
8	10	7	—	—	7	—	1	3 ½	5	8 ½	—	7
4	6	7	—	—	7	—	1	36 ½	5	5 ½	—	11
3	5	7	—	—	7	—	1	36 ½	5	5 ½	1	1
Third village
4	6	7	—	—	7	—	1	—	6	—	1	—
3	5	7	2	—	11	6	—	10	10	8	2	1 ½
0	2	5	2	6	5	—	1	—	4	—	2	—

s. = shillings

p. = pence